Monday, August 3, 2015

"Nightborn"

Lou Anders drew on a recent visit to Norway, along with his adventures traveling across Europe in his teens and twenties, to write Frostborn and Nightborn, combining those experiences with his love of globe-trotting adventure fiction and games (both tabletop and role-playing). However, he has yet to ride a wyvern. With the addition of characters Desstra and Tanthal, Anders hopes that his second book in the Thrones and Bones series will continue to appeal to boys and girls equally. He is the recipient of a Hugo Award for editing and a Chesley Award for art direction. He has published over five hundred articles and stories on science fiction and fantasy television and literature.

My second novel, Nightborn, has just been released. It’s book two in the Thrones and Bones series. It’s a series about a friendship between unlikely people, a boy who is an obsessive board gamer and a girl who is half frost giant. In the first book, Frostborn, the rather introspective Karn and the rather athletic Thianna don’t immediately like each other, but their shared adversity teaches them to appreciate and rely on their differences, and they part the best of friends. In book two, Thianna has fallen afoul of dark forces, and Karn is forced to leave his home and travel farther than he ever dreamed to rescue his friend. Flipping to page 69, I find myself on a page where an innkeeper at an establishment in which Thianna briefly stayed suggests to Karn that she might be deceased, and he adamantly protests, “She’s not dead!” Whereupon he receives his first real clue to her location. For a book about friendship, and the lengths to which one will go for it, I think this is a wonderfully representative page. Also, the fact that the innkeeper is a gnome is probably telling.